February 11, 2015
Book the Sixth of A Series of Unfortunate Events. In this book, the Baudelaires are put with guardians who actually kind of make sense. Jerome Squalor was a friend of their mother's (I bet he was in love with her...she must have been something else!), and had wanted to take the children in right from the start, but his shallow, greedy, evil wife Esmé wouldn't allow it...until orphans conveniently became "in" (fashion, that is). Wealthy Esmé is obsessed with keeping up with trends, even and especially when they are ridiculous. As it turns out, she's also in cahoots with Olaf, her former acting teacher.
Olaf's impersonation of an ambiguously European man named Gunther reminded me of Butters and Cartman and their racist Chinese impersonations in "The China Problem." Too bad Butters couldn't show up and shoot Olaf in the dick, because he took despicable to a new level in this book. He's kept the Quagmires in a cage at the bottom of an unused elevator in the Squalors' apartment building, letting them starve and sit in their own filth as he threatened to take their fortune and kill them. And the Quagmires are taken away again, by Olaf and Esmé and the doorman (really Olaf's hook-handed crony). The Baudelaires, after a physically and emotionally exhausting ordeal, are devastated.
Jerome is a decent man, but has no backbone. The kids tried to get him to see that Gunther, the fashionable auctioneer hired by Esmé, was really Olaf, but he stubbornly refused to see to reason. After Esmé leaves him to join Olaf's gang, Jerome offers to take the children away and protect them. But when they say that they want to help their friends, he refuses to help them. What a pussy!
I want to see more of Esmé, as she seems important to the whole V.F.D. mystery. She expresses that the Baudelaires' mother had stolen something from her...but what? Was Esmé trying to gold-dig on their father, but he ends up marrying a kinder woman? Violet starts to question this, but the children, in a trap at that moment, have no time to reflect on it.
The one annoying thing about this book was the continuous use of the title word "ersatz." I must admit that I didn't know it prior to this book, but the repetition of it was obnoxious to me. Otherwise, I enjoyed the tension of this book, and the added complexity of the Esmé character. The mystery now is only further tangled. We will see what comes next, and what becomes of the wretched Quagmires.
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